Evil, genocide, and mass atrocities

“Genocide,” writes Arne Johan Vetlesen, “provides us with the most severe and challenging instance of large-scale evil.” ¹ If the purposeful annihilation of men, women, and children numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions is not evil, then what else is? Unsurprisingly, many scholars who have been active in calling for renewed philosophical attention to evil invoke major genocides and mass atrocities – the Holocaust in particular – to argue that evil is an important part of our human experience and moral vocabulary. ² In parallel, numerous social scientists who specialize in research on genocides and atrocities have applied the label “evil” to the phenomena and cases they study. ³